


patron saints of lost causes

by rawquelicious



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Historical, Angels, Gen, Multi, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Resurrection, a lot of it, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-06-29 04:58:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15722454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rawquelicious/pseuds/rawquelicious
Summary: R is a drunk guardian angel, and Enjolras keeps dying.





	1. baptism

His brothers say,

"You’re drunk."

Of course they don’t.

They don’t have that word, and they don’t actually speak. It’s more subtle than that, like a thousand voices, attached to him, a literal divine chorus, singing,

"You’re drunk."

He is. His wings are unkempt, his conscience is fuzzy, his light is dim. Lately he has been feeling detached, having thoughts and feelings that he does not share. He had thought that was impossible, a few millennia ago.

They had very clear guidelines: love thy father, love thy brothers, love humanity. At first, it seemed easy, obvious, after all, obeying was his nature and all he knew. Nowadays, he thinks that two out of three is probably a good average for such a failure of an angel.

The problem had been Humanity. He didn’t understand, as his brothers did, that loving them was to not know them. Instead of loving, he fell in love. He started to drink, he wanted to drink them up. Their happiness, and their warmth, at first. His brothers drank it too, and it settled bubbling on their essence, setting them alight. None burned brighter than him, and none sang more beautiful praise to the Father.

He discovered sadness.

When he first tasted it, he thought he had uncovered the secret to truly loving humanity. It hurt his being, made him nauseous, but that moment, no angel was ever more beautiful, none was closer to the Father.  

He was wrong. He is very often very wrong.

He is drunk.

Lately, he’s been separating from his brothers. Certain angels do this, the ones that burn brighter than others, they eventually burn so bright that they become their own beings, they gain names and identities and sit at the right of the father. No one talks about the ones that burn even brighter, eventually they get cast down. Living without Father’s love is another one of those things that always seemed impossible, more than blasphemy, rejecting everything he is to his core.

One day, he wakes up(he never used to wake up, he’s not sure when he started to do it) with a name in his head. He does not feel his brothers around him. He does not burn bright, so bright he burns apart. Instead, his essence is dimmer but he has a name in his head.

R.

(It’s not Michael or Gabriel or Aziraphale or Castiel but at least it’s not Lucifer either)

He is drunk, his brothers tell him.

(I know, you idiots, and he can’t believe he thought it.)

He is lucky, his brothers tell him.

He is not fit for the heavens, but he’ll have a chance on earth, to prove his love. His devotion. He’ll protect a human life, one that is important to the father,

(he feels like screaming, they are all important, but he doesn’t because he hates humans)

(he does)

and in protecting this life he will prove his value.

R thinks he’s being demoted, and he doesn’t know where he drank that word.

 

* * *

 

The first time he meets Enjolras, his name is not yet Enjolras. He’s Aeneas, the golden son of Athens’ aristocracy. He’s nothing but a boy, really, all feathery limbs and golden curls, a sullen mouth, quick to pout whenever his masters refuse to indulge him in discussion.

As far as R knows, subtlety has not yet been invented. He shows to Aeneas in a blaze of light, all his eyes open and staring, some of them black as the night sky and some of them impossibly blue. His wings are stretched to full span behind him, their own eyes open and understanding and loving, grass-blue, glittering gray like the water running over the worn rocks of the creek where Aeneas used to splash when he was younger. R’s feathers are gray winter light, ethereal but also disturbingly similar to a unkempt seagull. His body is a beautiful body, beauty in terror with his scaly skin glistening between purples and greens and grays, his barrel chest, the soft grayish fur of his powerful long legs.

To his credit, Aenaes does not scream as R descends upon the well, sitting and looking at the boy.

The boy, faced with the abyss, stares back.

The silence lasts about a century, or a second. R is still getting used to the passage of time. He’s developing a distinct pulsating ache in his head (to accommodate this pain some of his eyes close and disappear and a luminous expanse of skin starts to exist instead, and to think of itself as _forehead_ ). He scratches at this new feature: a forehead, imagine that. He blinks, slowly, at the boy.

The boy blinks back, and then sort of unfolds beautifully, going from a careless melted puddle of limbs to a rod-straight posture, staring at R with defiant eyes and raised chin. The boy rubs his hands together deliberately, creating a flurry of limestone dust. For all of the boy’s show of stoicism, R can see the blood pumping at the boy’s neck, the sweat on his brow as the boy struggles with the impossible, and, marvelously, does not crack.

The silence becomes uncomfortable, something that R has never experienced before. It’s very human. He considers trying to drink it, but only for a split second before he is compelled to break it.

“Errrr” is the sound the angel makes, to his own surprise. He didn’t know he could be… hesitant. The wonder doesn’t last, it’s quickly replaced by a warm feeling on his stomach when he sees the kid raise a judgemental bushy honey eyebrow. R realizes what is the heavy warmth in the center of him, now, Humiliation. Shame. And after it, of course, comes pride, that compels him to open his wings to make himself look bigger. He clears his throat (a second ago, he didn’t have a throat, but now he can feel it, scratchy and strange) and speaks with a voice he never used:

“Behold, I have come to save you.” He says for lack of a better introduction.

The kid’s eyebrow is a weapon, truly, and it takes effort not to cower underneath its strength.

“Are you a god?” The kid asks.

“No.”

“Are you a titan?”

This makes R pause, consider himself, before he answers, “No.”

“So you were sent by a god, then? Or this is a trick.”

The angel just shrugs and hesitates, “Sort of right- I’m an angel”, and keeps seated on top of the well and looking down at Aenaes. The white hot midday sun in Athens is shining through the angel, but he remains resolutely gray when he says:

“Your father will call you to his chambers today. He’ll tell you that you are bright, his beautiful bright boy blessed by the gods, and he will tell you that he’s sending you away-” Aenaes opens his mouth ready to be indignant, but R continues in his booming voice, undeterred “- he’ll tell you it’s your duty. You’ll surpass your old master soon, and these times ask for a warrior more than a scholar. It’s a new world where Athens is losing its place. He’s afraid for you, and so you will be sent to Mieza.”

There is pleasure in seeing the boy caught unaware by these revelations, but he composes himself quickly and looks at R with fire in his light clear eyes.

“You’re just a vision. Are you Zeus’?” there is a sneer of disbelief there, for even when faced with such a creature as R, the boy remains a skeptic at heart. If the gods walk the earth, this one doesn’t believe in the ground their feet step.

Thinking of the thunder god, so flawed and human, and the father R knows in this heart, is so different and so absurd that R snorts with laughter before he can stop himself. He is startled by the sound, he had never laughed before, and he tentatively laughs again as the boy watches him. The sound comes out as a thundering “ahahah” that sounds nothing as when the boy just knocked it out of him. He tries again, expelling the air again from his lungs in a sort of guffaw but it still doesn’t sound right and the boy is starting to judge the angel very hard. The newness of humiliation has lost its sheen so the angel makes himself stormy and tries to regain his dignity.

“Your father will call you now,” he says with no further explanation.

From inside the house, a slave yells out to Aenaes. The boy rises slowly, and does not take his eyes away from the angel until he absolutely must, before turning to walk away he mouths “Don’t go anywhere”. It doesn’t surprise the boy that none of the suddenly busy slaves seem to see the huge monstrous thing on top of the well. The angel rolls its many eyes as if to say “Did you think that I came from the heavens only to talk to you for a minute and disappear?”

Obviously, gods do that all the time.

Aenaes returns and the angel is still there, sitting and waiting and watching. For a strange moment, one of the slave girls runs to the well to retrieve water and passes right through the monster. Aenaes observes as the girl seems to shiver and say a quick prayer.

The angel is smiling and looking at Aenaes with his knowing many eyes. The boy’s father’s speech was almost word for word the same as the titan had predicted, with a few more references to the complex political matters of the day. Macedon warriors at the walls of Athens had changed Aenaes father irreversibly, and the once inflexible and proud politician had never recovered. Athens itself had not recovered either, and these days Aenaes’ father and the other politicians busy themselves with one thing only: what does a peace with Phillip of Macedon looks like now that he has humiliated them. Does it look like partners in war conquering the Persians? Or does it look like slavery for all the greek people? Does this means an alliance with Sparta and Thebes? What is the lesser of those two evils? These days, Aenaes’ father speaks in meandering strings of riddles, metaphors and warnings, still, the meaning was clear:

You will go and study with the Macedonic prince and the old Aristotle in Mieza. You will become one of his companions, and bring glory to Athens. His father does not say, but it is heavily implied: you will not die.

It’s a hard new world one where an old man must risk his only male son in a fool’s errand, and for what? For the respect of a barbarian goat keeper from the mountains.

The angel’s smile is infuriating and conceited even from across the yard. The thing is, Aenaes is sure that before he turned and left, the angel did not have a mouth to smile with.

The angel unfolds itself from the top of the well, and even though Aenaes does not see him walking, it is suddenly by his side as the boy goes through the motions of preparing his trip.  It’s a wet constant present that sometimes brings a smell of sea foam that can only be described as “sad”. Faced with the extreme impossibility of this being clinging to him, the boy opts with the stubbornness of adolescence to simply ignore that this is happening and move on with his life. During studies of history and moral with his masters, the angel stays by his side. During weapons training, or chores, it’s almost invisible but always there, a heavy miasma in the air.

The night before they leave the boy whispers, “Aren’t you going now?”

The angel stirs and seems to get heavier and real-er with the effort of replying, “What? Are you talking to me?”

“Who else could I be talking to?”

“I don’t know. I thought you couldn’t see me anymore,” the angel whispers, “I’ve been trying to keep out of your way.”

The boy says derisively, “You are not very good at this.”

While they’ve been talking the angel has been getting gradually smaller, his form getting more solid and creating a dip on the woolen mattress besides Aenaes.

“It’s my first time”, says the angel, “The first time for everyone, I think.”

“I doubt that is true, Omer speaks of Aphrodite and the gods intervening in Achilles journey all the time.”

“You greeks and your fucking journeys,” the angel says, and then seems shocked at himself.

“I wish you left,” the boy continues with casual cruelty, ignoring the strange way the angel speaks in, “What are you even doing here if you just delivered a message that my father was about to give me?”

“Would you prefer if I came to tell you you’re with child? Wait, no. That’s later, you won’t get that reference. This linear time is killing me.” The boy doesn’t reply and waits for the angel to get on with the point, “I’m protecting you. I’m your guardian angel,” the boy still doesn’t react at all, so the angel’s voice takes a defensive tone, “It’s a new concept we’re trying out. I was against it, but apparently you are important.”

“Important to whom?” the boy asks, “Not to offend your mission, but I’m twelve. Usually the gods show to help great heroes. I’m still studying. You actually only came down here to tell me I was going to study more.”

“Don’t they teach you not to question god’s wishes?” when they began their conversation the angel’s many eyes were casting a gray glow to the room, but Aenaes notices that the glow is gone and now the angel seems to have only two shiny gray-green eyes. The more attention he pays to the angel, the real-er he becomes.

Aenaes thinks for a moment, “No, not really they don’t. The gods are all-powerful, but not all-correct.”

“You are unbearably smug for a twelve year old boy”, the angel says.

“And you are the most useless thing I’ve ever seen” the boy retorts and turns his back to the angel with a scowl, forcing his eyes closed and trying to command himself into sleep. He wishes the angel would try to make him speak again, if not for revealing secrets about the heavens, then just so Aenaes could talk about the worries that have been gnawing at him for the past few days. It’s the first time he will travel, nevermind travel more than ten days on horseback and by boat, accompanied by servants but not by his family with whom he has lived his entire life. And there is also a small nagging thought, the voice that tells him he may not be good enough, that he can’t see what he’s supposed to do with the clarity he once had. His life used to be laid before him as a simple path: he would learn, he would serve in the army and help protect and honour Athens, then he would become a general and hopefully be voted to the council as his dad had before him. Now, Athens and its democracy are weakened, and Aenaes’ place in the world no longer exists.

And there is an angel besides him, saying nothing. Maybe Aenaes is going insane. It didn’t even occur to him, after all even his teachers always tell him that he has too much faith in himself. It’s probably the first time he has ever considered he may be wrong, seriously wrong, about the reality of things, and it starts to become a panicky feeling on his belly and on his throat. He thinks it may be closing up, tomorrow he’ll be going to Mieza and he’s having visions of a terrible being that tells him he needs more schooling. This can’t be good. He’s supposed to forge alliances with the boy that will be king, and here he is about to fall asleep with an actual monster, what is wrong with him? What is wrong with him that he’s been feeling and seeing and talking half words to the angel for five days, and it never occurred to him to panic about this?

The angel moves, rolling towards Aenaes and throwing an arm around the boy who is breathing hard and loudly in the dark. You would think that the angel’s arm would be scaly like his chest and belly, but instead it  wraps around Aenaes and it’s soft and comfortable and warm, pulling him closer. The relief is immediate, the tight feeling in Aenaes’ throat disappears and he can almost feel the stress and the panic seeping away. What was he so afraid of, just now? Unexpected, an image pops in his mind. Going fishing with the old fisherman Damon and ending up with leeches on his legs, watching them gorge on his blood and then knocking them out with the back of his hand, watching the dark fat blobs writhing in the ground. “Sleep now”, the angel says, “I promise it will be better in the morning.”

The angel is curled onto his back and Aenaes falls asleep mindlessly running his hands on the soft greyish fur of his arms. It smells like the ocean, and Aenaes dreams of dying at sea.

When he wakes up, the monster is gone and a boy is sharing his bed, his weight warm and human, sweat gluing the boy’s chest to his back. It takes at least a few seconds for Aenaes to realize that this is not one of boys that used to play with him and then end up falling asleep in a pile, like puppies after a day of fighting and playing. Because he’s not a child anymore, and he does not have any friends, but it takes him a minute to think “oh no this is not right” and jump off the bed. His heart is racing and his breath is ragged as he finds his sleeping companion, transformed by human contact into a real human boy. He jumped from bed exactly at the same time as Aenaes, and they are now looking at each other from opposite sides, vicious dogs facing each other before a fight. Where Aenaes is blonde and tan, the boy has dark curls on alabaster skin that seems like it has never seen the sun before (it hasn’t).

It hasn’t because this skin did not exist yesterday.

Other than that, Aenaes can recognize his own face looking back, looking scared and snarling, as terrified as he feels. He’s moving out of pure fear, of waking up and seeing someone else wearing his face, his body. Aenaes jumps to the right, arms open and one hand in a fist the other in a claw, and the boy does the same. He leans left as if doing a feint, and the boy leans right like a disturbing mirror. The effect is chilling but while Aenaes can smell his own acrid fear-smelling sweat, now that they are not touching the boy seems to be getting a bit blurred, like he’s turning into mist, and a strong sea smell fills the room. The mist settles around them and Aenaes drops his hands and straightens his back, trying to calm himself before he opens his mouth to speak and the boy does the same.

“Stop that.” Aenaes says first.

The boy does not speak, and Aenaes is sure he would start screaming if this thing had taken his voice as well, but instead it shakes his head as a confused beast, before looking down at himself finally out of synch with Aenaes.

“Uh,” the angel/boy says, “Funny that should happen.” Then he pauses and looks at himself, turning his hands like hands are a new concept, looking at his arms, wiggling his fingers and poking his own stomach, “You have a lot of parts to be aware of.” The angel says like it’s an explanation.

Aenaes still wants to scream, but more out of frustration than fear now. He’s always been a solitary boy, sullen and not given to easily making friends. He enjoys stories, and learning, knowing about the heroes of old and to see their human flaws and human bravery, but he is the only son of a very rich man. He never had to make friends to survive and so he simply didn’t. Having someone (something) always on his back is driving him mad.

“You.” Aenaes starts darkly.

“Yes?” The angel looks like he has never done anything wrong, ever, in his entire life, and Aenaes has no choice but to groan in frustration and bury his head in his hands until he is calm enough to turn his back with no other word.

“Don’t follow me.”

Of course the angel does.

In the kitchen, a miracle awaits. Cynisca, the rotund and olive skinned Thracian slave that has cared for Aenaes since he was born, puts an extra plate with fruit, cheese and bread on the table for “master’s friend” without asking any more questions. This is immediately suspicious since Cynisca is the ultimate authority on everything that happens in their home, as well as any piece of gossip anywhere in Athens. If the reserved and overly serious Aenaes had brought a real human friend home he would expect Cynisca to attack them with all sort of questions about their parents social standing and what food there is at their house. Of course, it’s been years since Aenaes has been able to cultivate any sort of relationship with the sons of the noblemen his father works with, so who’s to say if Cynisca would do the same to them that she does to fishermen and slave boys running errands. But the way her eyes just glazed over when she saw the angel made the air on the back of Aenaes in stand up, prickly.

“Stop that.” He mumbles under his breath to the other boy, who seems to be trying to figure out if he does eat food by slowly banging his piece of bread against the side of the plate.

“Stop what? I’m not doing anything.” The boy punctuates his words by finally taking a bite of the dark bread, not even putting any of Cynisca’s soft goat cheese in it, and then humming appreciatively, “This is good, you should eat.”

“You’re doing something to her, stop it. She’s not yours to play with, demon.” Aenaes says firmly.

The angel’s eyes widen in shock, but then he tries on a strange grimace of a smile, saying “You’re a bit dramatic today for someone who has ignored my existence since I got here. I’m not a demon, and I’m not doing anything to her, Aenaes, it must be a,” the angel hesitates, “I don’t know if you have this yet, but it must be, eer, built-in. Specs. It must be specs.”

It makes Aenaes irrationally angry when the angel uses this sort of strange speech, all broken and out of place. He is a calm boy, a good boy, polite and well-educated and he never starts fights just for fun even when he’s practicing with other boys in the courtyard. But suddenly he has the urge to hit this kid. Already his body has forgotten that this is not a kid, but a monster.

“Make her normal.” Aenaes repeats in a hard voice, focusing his attention on his plate before he loses his temper.

“Would you believe me if I told you I have no idea how to do that?” The angel asks while piling cheese and honey on Aenaes’ piece of bread that he has apparently stolen. “This is delicious. Strange, I’ve always thought it was kind of stupid how you keep eating and shitting, eating and shitting. The whole system in general looked like a total design flaw, they said even Michael agreed when He came out with you. But you know what? I may be getting the point. I should’ve known He’s always right.”

Aenaes’ stare at the angel is as hard as the proverbial rock on the other side of a hard place. For his own sanity, he filters out most of what comes out of the boy’s mouth and just says: “What do you mean you have no idea how to do it? You’re an… I mean, you are something.”

“An angel,” he himself helps, “Is this a too modern word for you? A servant to God. The God, even if you are still stuck in that multitudes thing. A living shrine to His infinite wisdom. What you would call, maybe, a minion, a titan, one of those but definitely not a hero, since we are lacking the free will gene that is sort of invaluable for anything we do to count.”

“Your manner of speech gives me a headache” is the only reply Aenaes has for that, except he makes a vow to himself that he will stop speaking to the creature again. After all, it used to be easy to ignore.

He breaks that vow about an hour later when the creature keeps derailing Aenaes’ history lesson and his teacher just gets a foggy look on his face anytime the thing speaks and continues “yes yes that was exactly what happened in Creta, master’s friend”.

“This is ridiculous”, Aenaes finally breaks when he sees his teacher, who he used to respect, start to slowly undress since the angel suggested that maybe it is too hot for robes. “Are you going to do this to Aristotle in Mieza as well? I thought me getting a proper education with the man was your whole point, and if you’re failing in Athens I don’t see you being more of an asset to me in Macedon, whatever it is that actually awaits me there.”

“Harsh.” The angel says and rolls his eyes. He has maintained his human shape since he started talking with other people, eating and participating in the world, and his face seems to be getting more expressive. Aenaes can barely see himself in it anymore. It’s a whole different person who is unsure and sarcastic, mean and quick in a way that Aenaes is not. “But I get your point. I’m… I know this sounds bad, but I need you to believe in me.”

“You haven’t given me a lot of reasons for belief”, Aenaes replies.

“Isn’t that the point of it?” The angel hesitates again, runs his hands through his hair in a very human gesture of desperation, “Maybe should ask me my name. My bad, I guess I should’ve already told you that, when we met. It would’ve made this whole thing go along a lot easier. But you’re a very intense twelve year old, to tell you the truth.”

He keeps babbling until Aenaes interrupts, “Your name.”

“Yes, well, you see, names have power. When you name a thing, you make it real, and if you name me, they’ll… I’ll be more. Less…” the angel waves his fingers as if that’ll conjure the word that’s missing out of thin air, but Aenaes patience is even thinner.

“What is it then?” He snaps as this creature makes him jump through hoops when it could just tell him, even now he could just…

“It’s R.”

Behind them, Aenaes’ teacher has finished removing his robes and mumbles something about going to the sea, have a swim, freshen up.

“R?” Aenaes repeats ignoring the chaos of the household trying to stop a naked old man from roaming the streets, “Like the letter?”

“Yes.” The angel, R, says again, and draws it on Aenaes’ slate, ρ.

“Ah, Rho.”

“Okay, if that’s what you say. R, Rho, it’s fine.” He shrugs again, he’s in love with this human gesture. He emerges from the fire in Aenaes’ eyes freshly baptized. Now that Aenaes is a bit less angry he properly looks at Rho’s face again and the intensity of his stare is heady, his eyes are so blue that it kind of makes little black dots swim in R’s vision, like he’s staring at the sun.

Aenaes studies him carefully, and R fidgets. He is still paler than almost everyone Aenaes has ever met, but his face is interesting, with large ears and slightly crooked canines, pointing out. It gives him a mischievous look, along with his dark green eyes and strong black eyebrows under a mountain of dark curls. He looks like Aenaes imagines Hermes in his mind, tricky and shifty and funny, ready for a fight with nothing more than wit and charm. Aenaes, who even at twelve is too serious for his own good, is surprised to find himself mildly jealous. Rho looks like the kind of boy you’d expect to catch stealing apples.

His teacher comes back, a bit surprised at himself but apparently feeling better, and Cynisca comes up right behind the man, talking about the dangers of being out in the sun for too long. Her eye catches Rho sitting at the desk besides Aenaes and she stops in her tracks, her eyebrow raises in suspicion and she says:

“Say, who do you belong to, boy?” and Aenaes almost laughs in relief. Of course, that is before the story Rho makes up about being the illegitimate son of the Persian king who ran away to join Phillip’s forces because he believes in the future power of an united Greece.

“You are the worst.” Aenaes repeats once they are both stuck cleaning the kitchen floors, as punishment for political heresy, lying and inviting friends over that Cynisca did not meet before, but his words have no bite to them. Rho is fascinated by the soap, and then happy to throw water at Aenaes and laugh wildly at his annoyance, and his laughter sounds human.

That night they end up in the same bed again, after Cynisca absolved Rho of his lies and the vague story about being Aenaes’ friend/servant was accepted as gospel. They are curled towards each other in the dark like two parentheses, since Aenaes’ finds himself unable to sleep and Rho has proclaimed that he wishes to find out what happens to humans with no sleep.

Dawn is making the room light blue, and Rho feels soft, like his edges are all blurred. Like he used to feel with his brother close to him, shining in heaven.

Tomorrow they will start the journey to Mieza.

Aenaes has never left Athens, he never was outside his father’s sphere of influence, never traveled even though guards have been assigned to him and he won’t be alone, he’s still scared. The future is coming at him fast.

“What will happen in Mieza?” He whispers to Rho in the dark. He was distracted by the linen sheets but immediately focuses moss green eyes on Aenaes with mild curiosity and a bemused smile.

“So you do get nervous Apollo,” Rho says and Aenaes’ golden eyebrow twitch in desperation because he knows Cynisca calls him that heretic nickname sometimes but damn it it’s not for this demon to use. Unafraid, Rho carries on, “Do you really want to know? It’s not for men to know their destiny.”

Aenaes ponders on this for a while, in silence, still curled with his arm under his head and watching Rho’s look of intense concentration as he keeps petting the rough linen with his still unlined and smooth hands. Like this you would believe they are just two boys at the door of adulthood, trading secrets in the dark. Aenaes maybe doesn’t quite believe in the gods, but he can not completely disbelieve omens, and the stories that have raised him tell him that prophecies are as much curses as they are blessings. He knows the risks, but still he says:

“Yes, I want to know.”

Rho laughs out loud again, so hard that he snorts like a pig before he answers between gasps, “Oh, your dramatic little face. I don’t see the future that way, kid. It’s not all written out for you, you need to actually live it, make mistakes. Be wild.”

It’s too much for Aenaes, and Rho ends up riding the whole way to the port at Arkitsa with a very respectful black eye, grumbling about his pain all the way there.

Rho has been really enjoying being human, even the getting punched in the face for his big mouth. He has never been punched for being an asshole before, but he suspects he’s been one all along. It’s the first identity he tries on that actually suits him.  

The best way to describe being human is that it is much like being drunk all the time. He’s always experiencing new things, for example, did you know that every day the light is different when he wakes up? He’s been counting how many different sunsets and sunrises. He still hasn’t seen two animals that are the same, and has been endlessly fascinated with bugs. The best part has been the ride on the horse, but even the interesting time that he’s spent sick on the ship was a lot of fun. So many organs groaning and suffering. And the best part is, now that he’s at an human level, time has stretched around him, cushioning his experience like a soft comforter, a word he’ll forget any time now because comforters don’t exist yet. Everyday he wakes up more solid, and time is a luxury that he revels in. This human body has been growing so slowly that to think he’ll have to wait at this speed for Aenaes to become an adult and do everything remotely important, well, he has time to smell a lot of flowers along the way.

Mieza is at least ten days away by horse and boat, and when they get there the old Aristotle is nothing like Aenaes would expect from a teacher so good that a king would free an entire village for him. He is dry, both in spirit and in body, a strong old man who runs every morning in the rocky terrain to keep himself healthy, who speaks very little for a teacher, and then just talks and talks and talks for hours at a time when he so pleases.

The boy Alexander isn’t what they expected either.

Rho, who has been enjoying goading Aenaes along with what he considers fascinating made-up stories of what heaven is like, and enjoying even more the boy’s obvious sighs and eye-rolls of dislike and annoyance along the way, feels immediately cheated when Alexander reveals himself to be great. He’s older than them, but only barely, but his manner is already appropriate for the leader everyone expects him to be. He greets them kindly, shakes their hand with strength and immediately makes some sort of joke about the trip that makes Aenaes smile, the same Aenaes that reacts to everything Rho says with exasperation. For Rho, who everytime he says the kid’s name hears “, the great” afterwards in his head, like a big disclaimer, this is unfair. How is it possible that this person, who will become so incredibly powerful that R can almost feel the warp of history around him, is still nice?

Adding salt to the wound, Aenaes loves him immediately.

Rho knows that he should’ve not gotten attached. He’s here to protect this boy, to help him flourish and live the incredible life their mutual father has planned for him. Obviously this will have something to do with Alexander (the great, he finishes without thinking, damn it), because why else would God put them all here at this time, in this place? Rho knows this. He knows it.

But he’s gotten attached to the boy, and suddenly Aenaes is never around. For the first year they still sleep together in the same bed and Aenaes asks him about heaven everyday, to listen to his outlandish stupid stories. When he is irritated with a discussion with Aristotle, or a fight with Alexander (oh, they love each other but they fight about many things, and it sets Rho’s teeth on edge).

One day he’s taller than Rho, and how did that happen? Aenaes and Alexander are willowy trees stretching to the sun, both were invited to a party that Rho’s body clearly was excluded from, stuck as a boy. When he finally does grow up it’s too late. Not only are Alexander and Aenaes inseparable, as they now have a group, they call each other The Companions. Rho thinks it’s ridiculous and makes fun of it often and loudly, until he’s not invited to excursions to the river or the village, not to play-fight nor to watch pretty girls go fill their vases with water at the well. But, to be fair, neither Alexander nor Aenaes watch girls. The two boys are joined at the hip, at any given time you can see them having urgent conversations on military strategy with their heads together, joining their curls in blinding halos, or learning from their old master in the woods of Mieza. Aristotle’s lessons are about the body as much as they are about the mind, about keeping it strong and alert, a sharp tool to be used by intellect. The boys fight together, eat together, study together and play together.

One day, Aenaes does not sleep with Rho.

It’s fine. It’s fine, really, he’s forming bonds with Alexander, they are as brothers now or even closer, and one day, oh, one day. One day Rho wakes up after a few weeks, were them weeks or were they months or even years, how long has he been asleep? His mouth tastes like the ocean, and they are not in Mieza anymore. He wakes up and they are in a camp outside a place he’s never been, the warmest place on earth.

It’s an army camp, and Aenaes is the commander, going by a different name now, one given to him by Alexander himself. They call him Hephaestion, and when he looks at Rho his eyes are sky blue and beautiful, and they look right through Rho and don’t recognize him at all.

He does try to keep him alive, he does. But he stumbles to one of the fires’ in the soldier’s camp and they offer him wine in camadery, and he takes it. He thought he knew drunkenness before, but it turns out he had underestimated the ability of humans to make easy that which the heavens make complicated.

Wine is brilliant.

Aenaes dies in the morning, alone, while Rho is still passed out from his first experience of human drunkness.

 

* * *

 

 

He didn’t know what he expected, really, but it wasn’t this.

Maybe he still had some pride in him, or maybe he never caught the point of all of it (and what was it then, that point?) but he hadn’t really considered failure. Even if he thought of himself as a failure of an angel, he also thought humans weren’t that complicated to keep alive. After all, most of them last at most 80 years, and what is that to him? A blink. And when he had considered he may fail, while marching alongside Alexander’s men, fighting and killing, his sword deep in the belly of his enemies and a blonde blur on the corner of his vision assuring him that everything was still worth it, even then… What are 80 years for his father, their father? Even less than a blink. His mission is important, of course, but...

He sort of thought he would go back to heaven, when it was done.

Or maybe that it would be somewhere else, the place where Morningstar has been sent to and supposedly rules, but while he was in Heaven and he was many they always believed this to be a lie for humans to behave. Fire and brimstone and an angry father, maybe that was what R expected, when he failed.

Instead, it’s emptiness, nothing, darkness. Only the awareness that he exists, and memories of Aenaes.

 

* * *

 

Kissing Yeshua on the cheek and hearing him whisper “I know what you did, I know, it’s fine, I know you were the one who had to do it” feels like punishment for past mistakes, and it makes everything in R’s essence burn and choke up.

After his death, R just curls up on the street, 30 silver coins burning his pockets, unspent. He is in so much more pain than he could ever thought possible, even though he couldn't have told you why he would betray his master and friend, couldn't have told you even while he was going to Pontius Pilate as if he was a man in love, floating to the ruler and offering his messiah’s head on a plate. It is the first time since he was cast out of Heaven that he feels the voice of his father, deep inside of him, moving his bones and talking through his mouth as he betrays the only human he has ever truly loved.

After three days of excruciating pain, the word is everywhere. Yeshua has risen again, after three days the women who tended to his burial place say the rock at the entrance has been moved, that he got up and walked away.

Since he is not needed anymore, the traitor just disappears, vanishes into thin air.

 

* * *

 

There are many stories of the once and future King, so know this one.

The nights in Albion are dark, blue and bitterly cold. Arthur, who is not yet king, has been riding for days through empty wilderness and thick forests. His companions are tired from this seemingly ridiculous mission. Arthur knows that they would prefer if he were to go and be a proper politician, kiss the right hands, make peace and prove himself through verve and sword the true son of Uther and true king of all England.

But Arthur had a dream. And so they ride, through the mountains of picts and fae people, to the edge of civilization, and then beyond that, to the dark places where old gods are still respected and blood is poured down dark holes in the ground to account for the return of spring.

Spring is a dream behind them now, as they ride through the longest night in the year, seemingly endless as they follow their king, barely a boy and barely a soldier, simply on the strength of a dream and a prophecy.

The forest is getting sparser and colder, the trees around them are so tall that when the horses pass under them the full moon is covered and they ride in complete darkness only to rediscover it as a burst of silver light between branches. The fog around them seems to be clearing, or else morning is finally here, pale grey and weak. Arthur dismounts, and his men soon follow him.

“We walk now, leave the horses here. There is a lake nearby.”

There are only three other riders, so it’s not any big show of strength that makes them respect Arthur, instead they just _like_ him. In the forest stand Bedivere, his oldest companion who trained him in melée and jousting and dirty fighting, Gawain his nephew who is the purest heart Arthur has ever known, and Kay. Kay who is stronger than any mortal man, Kay who is said to be cursed by his father even before he was born so that his heart would never know love, Kay who was raised as his adoptive brother in the castle, growing stubborn and dark in the shadows as if he were moss on the tree that is Arthur, rising to the light.

Kay, Gawain and Bedivere look at their king, awaiting orders.

“I don’t like this,” Kay’s voice is a low growl and he has a stormy look on his dark face that Arthur knows well and doesn’t particularly like.

“To speak the truth Kay, you never seem to much like anything” Bedivere’s voice booms in the empty forest before dawn, making all the bird around them fly at once, with a boom.

Even though nobody is following them, Arthur shushes the men, which makes Kay go even darker, and quieter, following his king with no further word. Ever since they were little and Kay showed up in Arthur’s life, he’s always been right behind him, ready for any fight Arthur could throw them in. Bedivere, who is more than father to them both, used to run around them in the courtyard when they would finally enrage him enough to earn a spanking with the blunt of his sword. Now this huge barrel chested man falls behind them both, with a smile and a shake of the head that says he doesn’t believe, not yet, but Arthur knows he will. The quiet and polite Gawain stays behind to keep an eye on the horse and Arthur is exceedingly proud of his nephew, for understanding his role.

There are no further words as they follow Arthur into the dark.

The lake happens upon them slowly, which is a weird way to describe three men walking towards a body of water. One minute they are stepping into hard real rough ground and the other they are almost floating through a wave of mist, they can’t see where they are putting their feet, and then, all at once, they are standing knee deep inside a lake so big it stretches out over the horizon.

Kay glances to his right and notices with no particular surprise that Bedivere is no longer with them. Arthur looks back at the same time and even separated by a few feet Kay can see that there is something wrong with his king’s eyes, that they are almost silver instead of blue and even though his pupils are dilated like those of a scared small animal, they are also silver, like a coin placed on his eyes. Even though he looks like a man with no reason left in him, Arthur says:

“I thought you would stay behind as well.”

“Seems you were wrong about that,” Kay replies in a soft tone that doesn’t disturb the water or the mist at all. In fact, he seems less and less corporeal the more they go into the water. Arthur has known this man all his life, how come he never noticed that Kay seems to be more gray than the tan dark skin that gave him the name “the Roman”? Arthur stands on the lake, transfixed, looking at his oldest friend in the world, who keeps moving without him into the mist.

When he gets closer, Arthur can see that Kay is gray but beautiful and his dark green eyes are still shining on the center of his face and they’re the only real thing Arthur can focus on. Then Kay grabs the scruff of Arthur’s neck, and it’s a real physical hand, one with callus and rough skin, one that has held a sword and fought alongside Arthur more times than he could count. It’s real, Kay’s hand on the back of his neck, and Kay pulling him closer, holding him for a split second, and whispering in his ear:

“You don’t know how hard I’ve worked to keep us away from this lake, my king. But I should’ve known that your stubborn ass wouldn’t be able to stay away,” Arthur leans into Kay’s hand just a little, tilting his head looking for comfort that Kay cannot give, “No turning back now, I guess. You’re the worst.”

Then Kay lets him go and goes into the water, dives down but amazingly does not create any ripples or disturbances, he just disappears. The water doesn’t even feel like water, softly lapping on Arthur’s legs it feels more like wind spraying the ocean to the top of the cliffs in his step-father’s cornish home, where he and Kay would run together like wild things.

After the lake swallows Kay there is a deep quiet all around Arthur, the type of quiet where nothing moves. He is not a religious man this king, not yet, he knows about the rituals of the old gods and takes part in them, but he has taken the communion bread as well alongside his weak royal father in his deathbed. But here, standing at the end of the world, the shores where Albion ends and Avalon lays behind the mist, Arthur feels the need to pray and so he kneels on the insubstantial water.

While kneeling the water almost comes to Arthur’s chin and makes him sway lightly with the strong current, even though he is close to the shore and the water does not run deep. He lifts his joined hands to his chest in prayer and allows his eyes to close but the water is too close now, it has invaded him and even behind closed eyes Arthur can only see gray-white mist.

Even though Arthur does not know it words are tumbling out of his lips, soundlessly absorbed by the water that has raised to engulf him, “my eyes are yours and my hands are yours and my heart will be yours I don’t care to be king or prince, I care only about my people and their survival and their freedom. If you cannot make me good, then don’t make me king, but if you can then this must be it, you have my eyes and my hands and my heart, I came to the place you showed them to offer them to you and I-”

“Enough.”

Arthur stops, and only then does he notice he’s been speaking and swaying, but also that he is fully wet even though he is kneeling on the shore, looking at a lake that is now a flat black mirror under the silver night sky where before there was only mist. A monster is standing on the mirror, looking at him, and it was the monster who spoke with a voice that he would know everywhere.

Arthur knows this monster.

“Ah, there you are” Arthur says breathlessly, and he is laughing before he can stop himself, a hearty human laugh that just rips out of him even though it’s probably wrong, all wrong. He is the worst, really, if he could not remember that he has done this before.

It’s Kay, but it’s also not. He has always been short and stocky but now he towers over Arthur, even with his bent beastlike legs half submerged in the water. The scales that cover his chest and shoulders glitter in purples and dirty greens, and his eyes - his many eyes - are still Kay’s eyes, mischievous and cruelly funny, green and gray and almost blue on his wings, looking at Arthur. On his right hand the angel holds a sword.

He walks towards Arthur with purpose and grace, not seeming particularly moved by the extraordinary circumstances of having been a supernatural being this whole time and not just Arthur’s companion, instead he just looks like he wants to get this over with. Now that the strange enchantment seems to be wearing off, Arthur doesn’t know if he’s offended or helplessly fond of how Kay-like it is to undercut the magic with such human impatience.

The angel makes an aborted half-move to touch the blade to Arthur’s shoulder, but then he just shrugs and turns it around to offer the sword, hilt first, to Arthur who is still kneeling.

“You should get up, I guess. And take the sword already, He wants to make this into a big thing but it’s just the two of us here,” the angel shrugs again and the movement looks disturbingly human, so much that Arthur wishes Kay would stop being so damn casual about this.

Arthur grabs the hilt and uses the sword to help himself up. The angel is very close, and has a slight smile on his face, a smile that Arthur is used to see dancing in Kay’s eyes and that usually means trouble ahead. Arthur pulls the sword and when the angel lets go of it the blade has left a deep cut on his hand. His bright red blood is shocking against the inhuman grayness of his slashed open palm and the angel looks at it like he’s as surprised as Arthur to see himself bleeding. Arthur finds himself hypnotized by the blood reflected as a red flash on his blade, and the perfect balance of its weight on his hand, the comforting steel and the simple pummel that seems like it was made for his hand even when he holds it on his left, which he used to prefer until Bedivere beat and trained the instinct to use his left hand out of him.

“Most men live their entire lives without seeing something as beautiful as this sword” Arthur says when they start walking back to the horses, “Does it have a name?”

His father had a sword with a name, Uther had. His real father.

“It does but I’m meant to let you figure that out by yourself,” the angel replies.

“So if I know you, you’ll tell me in about five minutes”, and Arthur does know him.

“It’s Excalibur.”

Arthur smiles to himself, without looking back, “Not even that. You are honestly the worst angel I have ever met.”

Behind him the angel shrugs with intent and says, “Whatever, life is too short to have to wait for you to have all your friends vote on the sword’s name.”

Arthur still can’t hear steps on the gravel other than his own, which sound thundering and heavy in the silent forest, and it seems exceedingly important to him that he does not look back to check if the angel is following him. There was a story his mother used to tell him, about going to hell to look for something precious but losing it if you turn to look at it.

They are a few feet back inside the thick forest when he starts to hear sounds again, animals, rustling of leaves, a crow flying above them lets out a blood curdling scream that startles Arthur. Then there is a human voice, echoing above the blue-black trees, Bedivere, singing an old song, about the king who will return.

Arthur stops on his tracks, looking ahead, Excalibur in his hand, and seconds later Kay stops beside him, human again and like he never was anything else than the man Arthur grew up with, his cunning advisor and most mercurial friend, the one as capable of diplomacy as of starting a war over the lack of wine at dinner.

“I don't think I can do this”, Arthur suddenly says, and knows it to be true. It feels good to say it, to the emptiness, in this strange and magical place before they are forced to go back to reality.

“Don’t worry”, Kay says, “We’ve done it before.”

When they walk into the clearing he announces in a solemn voice, “this is your king”, and the first three knights of the round table take to their knees in front of Arthur and pledge their loyalty to him.

When Kay gets back to his feet, he’s Merlin.

 

* * *

 

The middle ages are one big bender for R. He experiences time all at once, but that layer is a particularly bad one. _Missed connections._ He drinks those words much ahead of this moment, but it’s still the only thing he thinks as he is born over and over again, and never finds him.

R lives in a cave. He is a beggar on the streets of London. He dies of plague. He is a sailor in the Spanish armada. He drinks human wine to the point of sickness, learns the word drunkard, and convinces himself that he is human for a while. He’s not good at it, he drinks drinks drinks, and it starts to eat at him.

He keeps being born. It’s awful.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, it’s comfort he gives, and he does not know why he can do it some of the time, but not all of it.

Jeanne is filled with divine purpose. She walks bathed in light with her head held high. She strides into churches, into rooms filled with powerful men, into the battlefield, into her cell.

In her dreams, an angel speaks to her. She never tells anyone about this detail, but it doesn’t look like the angels in the paintings. It looks fierce. It looks sad. It has drunk red rimmed eyes all over his face and wings.

It tells her, “You can save France. But don’t. Don’t because I’m on my way, and I need to get there before you burn, my-my-mine.”

The angel calls her by her true name, at night. It ignites something in Jeanne, makes her burn inside, she pants in her bed and calls out to Christ and God and all the saints,

“Please save me.”

The angel says, “Jeanne I’m trying I’m trying but I’m stuck at sea, stuck in a tiny stupid body, stuck dying in a cave and not knowing where you are. Jeanne, you can do it. Go to the Delphin, take a sword against the enemies of France. You, you Jeanne from nowhere important, here, I’ll show you.” Terrible, wonderful visions through the night, making her see the future and pieces of the past. She is Christ on the cross and still the angel is there, “I’ll help you Jeanne. I love you Jeanne.”

Other nights the angel says, “Jeanne please don’t go, don’t. Don’t. I know what He wants to do with you, and I’m not letting it happen this time. Don’t go. Go to your father, ask forgiveness for running away. Say it was a fanciful dream, that it was all invention. Feed the cows and wait for me, for this stupid stupid stupid useless - Jeanne, I-”

She has other visions that she does not share with anyone, visions of common life, a good life. A warm home of wood and stone, with a strong dark husband waiting for her, one who picks her up like she’s nothing and twirls her around. In these dreams her husband has a comely reddish face and she loves it with all her heart, all the rough charm of his dark green eyes and his thick dark eyebrows, the way his canines stick out when he laughs. When he laughs, there are thunderstorms outside. They have children in these dreams, small untrusting and skittish dark things that nip at her ankles. Jeanne wakes up crying from the loveliness of holding her babes tight against her breast.

She doesn’t falter.

The angel fades with battle. She shines with light on the bloody fields, a maiden but a bloody one, on top of a horse, with armor that does not fit her, that rubs at her in the wrong places until she has red blisters on her shoulders, on her belly, and they keep bleeding inside the iron, but Jeanne is a woman. She is used to bleeding. The angel stays quiet through her rise, and through her fall, enough that by the end, alone in her cell, she starts to believe what the English say.

She refuses to say it during her trial, but she tries the words on at night, foreign in her mouth:

“I’m a fraud.”

She doesn’t feel like one. But she says it to herself, repeats it till she can almost believe it. Her brain is a small panicked animal, and not the maid of Orléans. She defied a King, and a pope, and many powerful men in dark grey rooms, but now she is trying to perform this trick on herself. If she makes herself believe, her rabbity brain says, she’ll live. Live live live, and go back to the meadow where the virgin had first talked to her. Jeanne prays a new prayer in the dark:

“It was all lies.”

“I want to apologize to my father.”

“I’m a fraud.”

“If you let me go, I will marry and take care of cows my whole life, I promise.”

“I’m a fraud.”

She says it so much that the words lose all meaning. She’s only nineteen, her hair shorn so violently that her head still hurts and bleeds in some bald spots. She can feel her own ribs through the thin cotton dress they gave her (a dress, a dress, when she spent the last year living like a man on battlefields and castles). Jeanne drums her fingers on her ribs, breathes into the dark, repeats again and again, “I’m a fraud a fraud a fraud.”

As hard as she tries, and she does try hard, because Jeanne has the dream of a small life inside her and so she tries and tries, but she can’t make it sound like the truth. She can’t make herself believe her own failure.

On her last night on earth, the angel returns.

She’s so close to death that what she missed as a child becomes obvious. When the virgin appeared to her, it was the angel, only their wings were filled with eyes, blue like the virgin’s mantle, and they were shining golden and beautiful as if reflecting the warm glow from God. Everything is one and the same. Now grayish and folded the angel looks small in her cell, an albatross.

“Ah, there you are” she says “I missed you.”

The angel is crying, diamond tears running in rivulets from its wing eyes, dropping on to the dark disgusting floor.

“I fucked up,” the angel replies, “Not the right time, no, not the right words. Jeanne, I was wrong.”

She eyes him suspiciously from her bare cot, “You can’t be wrong, you’re an angel.”

R chuckles, a sad broken sound, “I wish that was true, but it isn’t. I don’t think you believe that either. You never used to, at least,”

Jeanne takes a long hard look at his scraggly gray wings, the red eyes, the distinct smell of spirits that surrounds him. She doesn’t trust him, she doesn’t, she refuses to. She’s a stubborn and sullen girl, she always was, even when she was small her father used to beat her for disobeying the rules she deemed stupid, but still, she was unbent. This sorry excuse for an angel does not change that, so Jeanne shrugs, her lips pursued in grim determination, and she doesn’t say a word.

She gets up, walks to him with the same purposefulness she walked up to the Delphin, and eyes him up and down. She is short, tiny, and bald, but still R cowers under her steely gaze, he makes himself smaller until he is looking straight at her. He watches as she raises her small hand and touches his face, the same cold studying look that reminds R, with a kick of painful recognition, of Aenaes, Yeshua, Antonio, Margaret, so many eyes looking up at him, looking through him.

Jeanne touches him, and it makes him human, or at least an approximation of a human. Just like when she saw the face of the virgin in the being in  front of her, it’s obvious now that the angel is her husband. Maybe it always was, because she would recognize his kind comely face anywhere. She slowly runs her fingers up his cheek, touching his scratchy beard and thick eyebrows. He’s barrel chested and wide as she is wispy and frail, his hair a mop of dark curls, and when he smiles at her she can see his canines, a little crooked and stuck out, just as she remembers from years of dreams.

“You’re disappointed,” her husband says, and under his rueful smile there is something else, something fragile and sensitive that Jeanne suddenly wants to viciously destroy.

“I may not believe you,” she says finally, ignoring his pleading look and instead running her fingers curiously down the plains and valleys of his face, to rest at his neck. “But I remember you. Are you here to save me, then? Take me back to the Delphin?”

The angel’s laugh is more of a sob, and it wrecks him, makes his body shudder in pain, Jeanne can feel it in the fingertips she still presses against his pulse.

“No, I didn’t really think so”, she answers her own question.

Her husband grabs Jeanne’s hand and kisses it before placing it down on the center of his chest. Jeanne can feel his heart and  it doesn’t feel human. It’s like touching lightning.

“I wish he had made you to be happy and alive,” her husband the angel says softly, looking at her with round pleading eyes. “It can still happen. I could save you. I could. You’d just have to…”

“Don’t.” She cuts him off harshly, “If you say it, I will scream so much they will kill me right now and save us both the trouble.”

His hand rubs at his eyes, and she knows, she knows this gesture means that she has exhausted him. An entire life of knowing and loving this man, and not knowing him. His other hand rests at her waist, and her traitor body thinks it belongs there. He looks up at her from under his fingers, and looks at her with such a hopelessly fond, human, exasperated look, that she wants to kiss him.

“Jeanne, it would only be a few words. Just say you were wrong, say-”

“I won’t,” she cuts him off. It’s only right now that she knows she never will. “You know I won’t”, she says it softer this time, and gives herself permission to run her hands over the large expanse of his chest, up to his shoulder blades, and then just lets her head fall and smell the clean smell of him. He smells like the ocean.

He is crying openly now and there is something terrible about seeing such a large man cry, or to feel it as she does, his chest heaving under her palm. The need to comfort him is as familiar as if they were really married all those years of dreaming, and she holds onto him as if he is the one dying tomorrow, holds him and runs her fingers through his hair and back, soothing him.

“Will you still do me a favor?” She does ask at some point, in a small voice.

His big hand lifts up her chin so he can look at her, red rimmed eyes and all, smile and say, “For you, Apollo, anything.”

“Will you lay with me and tell me stories about heaven?”

When her husband throws his arms around Jeanne, picks her up like she’s nothing and carries her to the only wedding bed she’ll ever have, she feels like she has just arrived home after being away for a long time.

The next day, Jeanne burns at the stake.

 

He should’ve stopped after that, he knows. He should’ve stopped running away, and go and find his precious burden, and try to keep them alive for once, give it a real try, one that could’ve made his father and brothers proud. Instead, he is angry at everything. At his father. At Jeanne, for her stupid stubborn will to keep dying for nothing. He must have seen them die about a 1000 times, or maybe more, or maybe less, in useless revolutions or small revolts.

They are concubines in the Ottoman Empire, and everything is made easy for them, even finding each other. Her name is Emine, and it’s one of those times where her bright blue eyes wash straight through R and do not see her at all. R, who is tiny and dark and not even noticed by the man who owns them, is fine with this. It’s less trouble for her, after all, less talking in the dark, less chances for one to get close, really close, when amongst all these women. She enjoys the palace, with it’s colorful marble and lattice patterns that give R a nice tingling when she looks at them for too long, a tingling in her essence that she remembers from home.

Emine hates it, and R, loving her Golden Cage, has to watch her Apollo put herself in stupid dangers even though they now live in the safest place on earth. Hurrem, the sultan’s favourite, tries to reason with Emine more than once, whispering in cool shaded tea rooms:

“He is a good man, and he treats us well. There is so much more that you can do if you are sweet, if you smile and give him sons. Don’t you see what I am building?” Hurrem ends up asking, opening her soft hands as if encompassing all palace. “You are so clever. I could use you by my side, if only you were quieter, calmer, more…”

Faced with Emine’s stony silence and worryingly furrowed brow, Hurrem lets the sentence die with a vague flurry of her hands, calling for more wine.

R can’t help but agree with the beautiful and fat Hurrem, whose legendarily savvy political advice is valued even by the Sultan himself. But headstrong Emine, sullen and too serious for her own good, always just shakes her head no. Her body is always tense, and sometimes she gets so angry she trembles with it, and closes her fists in rage, and she says something like:

“Don’t you understand, Hurrem? None of that matters if we can not be truly free.”

R wants to scream at Emine, “Why are you such an idiot”, but instead she turns her back and goes to play with the other girls, or maybe to find an eunuch who will give her sweets. She is tired of this drama. She will not be pulled in again, she is determined to have a nice life and godamned be Himself if she will not force Emine to have one as well.

She does not see the dangerous determination in Emine’s face. She doesn’t pay enough attention. After all, why would they not be safe? They are the beloved property of a good man. They are well fed and dressed and loved. All the world’s delights are theirs.

Not even two weeks pass till one morning R goes down for breakfast and Emine is gone. No one speaks a word of her, like she never existed, and it takes R a lot of persuasion to convince an eunuch to tell her what had happened.

When the Sultan went back to visit Emine’s bed, as he had the right to do, she had bitten his most precious possession off of him.

R refuses to let herself vanish as she usually does when she fails her mission. She is too angry to die, at first, and then too surprised that her father doesn’t smite her at the heresy of staying alive when Emine is dead.

This the first time a terrifying thought will take over R and start to haunt her: has he forgotten about us? How long has it been, isn’t it just over a millennium now? She always assumed that this was a mission and that eventually she would return to Heaven, to her brothers, to singing Ossanas and being delighted at all times. Now, she doubts.

“Fuck this shit, I’m going to live,” she decides after considering this by herself, laying in the dark next to at least a hundred other sleeping girls.

She does. She has children and helps Hurrem rule, before the drinking gets too bad and the other women stop trusting her entirely. She sees her children die. She gets old, and eventually dies herself, and by that time she has convinced herself that she is human.

She hates every second of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes:  
> \- If you are an historian, what else can I say except sorry?  
> \- Here’s a full list of real people mentioned and grossly disrespected so far:  
> Hephaestion, Alexander the Great, and Aristotle, and Philip II from Macedon), hotties with bodies;  
> Jeanne d’Arc, self-made saint;  
> Hurrem Sultan (Roxelana), one of the most powerful women in the Islamic Golden Age;  
> \- I hope you enjoy this ridiculous over-dramatic thing, because I sure enjoyed writing it.


	2. sacrament

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They are pirates and students and artists and muses. There is a June rebellion with political motives, and a June rebellion with aesthetics purposes.

An angel rolls into Windsor, Connecticut, on the arms of a storm.

That very night, Alse Young wakes up startled in her modest bed as her husband continues to snore deeply beside her. For a few  seconds, she thought his breathing was the sound of men dying in battle. She was dreaming. In her dream she was a boy, and a warrior at that. God was talking to Alse in her dream, a reedy voice with many eyes, telling her she was destined for great work and great tragedy.

Unable to go back to sleep, Alse goes to her child’s bedroom to look at the sleeping girl who is her namesake. Sometimes Alse has what her husband calls hysterics and this must be one of those, she thinks rationally. She is sick, sometimes, and thinks herself a warrior and a scholar. This made her want to learn from wise men and women all about gathering herbs for sickness of other sorts of help, and helping with births. Still, even as she keeps herself busy with her wise woman medicine, she is always unsettled, as if something in her chest begs her to move move move do something, she just could never understand what. Looking at her sleeping daughter Alse tries to pray for forgiveness, but what for, she does not yet know.

There is a force making her move her across the sleeping child’s room, to the window that faces their small courtyard. A lot of English plants don’t grow here in the colonies, but outside there is pennyroyal and rue alongside the lavender and mint.

Between the coarse naked bushes, a girl stands down there staring up at Alse.

She seems young, and her eyebrows are like wings on the center of her pale face. Alse can see her eyes, dark and green, her black hair is long and loose. She is barefoot but seems to feel no cold.

Alse is unafraid. She has been expecting this, of course. She goes downstairs and opens the door.

Two months later, Alse Young is the first witch to hang in the American colonies.

 

* * *

 

When Mary Read is captured by a pirate ship, she’s been expecting it for a while. It’s only when she is forced to kneel on the hardwood deck of the offending vessel and she looks up to the golden captain that she understands, finally, she’s been waiting for it her whole life.

All the small tragedies of her life, all the huge and tiny victories, the time spent as a man, the time fighting in wars and in sea, the time pretending to be a wife, it all crystallizes the moment she sees her. Oh, and she’s not the captain, what a clever girl, of course she’s a first mate, and she’s a man as well, how fitting for Mark who is Mary who is R, how could they forget? The human was once divine.

It takes two weeks for them to reveal themselves to each other. Two weeks of tension, of golden flashes on the corner of her eye. Mary, who is still Mark, works like the other men who started the journey with her, she keeps her head down and tries to wait. They circle each other. There is not much room on a ship but there is still room enough that when one enters a room, the other is leaving it. Days and days of never quite looking at her face, just catching glances of her whenever she leaves or stays. Her red hair under a tricorn (a tricorn! Will wonders ever cease? A stupid hat! Her Aenaes, her Jeanne, here! and she’s under a silly hat), a crooked nose and a flash of white teeth keep Mary awake all night next to whatever stupid man she was sleeping with even five days ago, callused hands casually grabbing onto a dangling rope next to Mary before she climbs away, disappears into heaven.

The first day she asks,

“So what’s the name of that pretty boy?”

There are snickers from the other men of the crew, that as much as anything tells her that the secret of what is between the first mate’s legs is an open one but she’s still not expecting the reply from Higgs:

“No lad, that is no pretty boy but an ugly woman. Anne Bonny our very own Boudica.”

Mary laughs at that because bonnie she is indeed, ugly for men maybe but not for her, in Mary’s eyes she’s golden and fierce, made to command, made for the open sea and for the respect put in her name. It doesn’t surprise Mary, who was raised as a boy and has served England both in sea and on the fields she watered with french blood. You can find free women everywhere, just look at the sea, at the places that fall away from society.

She starts dreaming of war and death the first few nights on the ship. She trashes at night and keeps seeing the bonnie Anne with blood spurting from a smile slashed into her neck, her beautiful blue eye exploding with the impact of a steel ball, her back pierced by muskets. She wakes up sweating and aroused, breathing hard, and she tosses and turns and can’t sleep until she finds Calico Jack, blessly alone, and rides him to exhaustion.

It is known that Jack belongs to Anne. R leaves red scratches all over him, like a love note. Find me, the pattern says, find me because you know it’s time.

She can feel Anne’s eyes on her throughout the ship, a queer feeling on the back of her neck at all times. There is a week with no wind, that leaves them all despondent and in a rotten mood, and suddenly salvation. A small commercial ship in the distance, a chance for good fighting and better plunder yet to be had. Anne screams above the crashing of the waves as they busy themselves roping the sails to change direction and preparing the cannons and muskets, “Come on you sons of bitches, you devils. Are you not here to be free and rich men?”

That night, drunk on rum and on quick and good killings, R stumbles from her hammock and out of the common sleep quarters up to the captain’s room. She saw Anne hanged for piracy in her dreams.

“Are you coming to look for him, then?” a voice she would know everywhere asks from the dark.

“Aye. I guess I was about to do that,” Mary says and she can hardly breathe. Now that her eyes are getting used to the poor moonlight that streams through the small cabin windows she can see a flash of gold reflecting on Anne’s loose hair but not much else. Not her eyes, not her face to see any recognition that, any memory.

What is the point of keeping oneself alive, if you will not be remembered?

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Anne says and gets up suddenly from around the room, and in 3 quick strides she is just one inch away and R can feel her breath on her lips and she feels like crying, “You took very long.”

It feels like being seen.

“You did hide in the middle of the ocean. Aenaes.”

Her smile is a flash of white in the dark, and while they do not kiss then, they don’t sleep either. Instead, they lie in the captain’s bed and trade secrets about heaven.

It’s very easy being a woman in the sea. The next day, Mary simply leaves her shirt open like any other man in the crew, and that is it.

They are robbers and murderers, criminals and wanted by the crown, so was it so wrong that Mary thinks this would be her easy life? The one they get to enjoy? It seems that way at first, when all they do is drink and go wherever they want.

(Except that, at night, Anne whispers things like, “one day we’ll take all this money and go back to England, I’ll go get my children and you can get yours and we’ll open a school and teach them about the world and the people that walk it and we’ll buy them titles if we have to, to be taken seriously, they’ll have to take us seriously-”)

Those tentative first few days, Mary sneaks out from the common barracks and tiptoes into the captain’s room. Sweet dumb Calico Jack doesn’t ask questions, bless his heart, and he enjoys buggering boys enough that some nights there are just the two of them there,

(Those nights, some nights, Anne says things like, “Forget the children, I hate them, is that wrong? I hate that they were made in me, and then ripped from me, and I hate that they exist somewhere with my hair or my eyes and I never gave them either, forget them please. We’ll move to Jamaica, we’ll find a small island with everything on it and we’ll create our own country, we’ll do our own laws. Mary, you understand, we need to hurry up. We need to do it while there are still empty islands to discover.”)

Other nights Jack stays between them and they don’t touch,  just their hands grazing over him and they wouldn’t know why they don’t do it, except for sake of some ancient taboo that still keeps them apart.

When they are captured by the british navy, they know they should’ve been expecting it for a while.

The thing is, they aren’t, not really, not even R who has been awaiting disaster the moment she saw Anne and her golden red hair. But the sea life is good to them, they have stolen a good ship and found a better crew and spent years terrorizing the Jamaicas, they get complacent, fat and happy. When tragedy does come, it comes in the middle of a celebration, the whole of them drunk off their asses and Calico Jack (ridiculous, dear loaf, dumb safety barrier between them) and all the men of their crew passed out in their own vomit. The two women are the only ones who fight the authorities, firing every bullet they have and screaming like banshees, like demons from hell, their breasts and teeth bared at every men.

In the end, Anne screams at Jack when she is finally captured, "Had you fought like a man, you need not have been hang'd like a dog." But R, who has been a coward for literally all eternity, only feels an infinite compassion for the drunk man. What else could it be asked of Calico Jack, that had not been happily given?

The moment they are brought to Spanish Town, Mary grabs both Anne’s hands in hers and looks deeply into her open blue eyes, before saying:

“We’re going to plead the belly.”

“No, I won’t do it, no,” Anne shakes her head and R can see unshed tears in her eyes, she’s so stubborn her golden love that even her tears refuse to fall. She feels such softness that there is nothing else to do but to raise her hand to Anne’s cheek, rub the dirt from her tan skin like one would do to a child.

“What good will dying do to you, my love?” R says softly, kindly, “What will you be dying for? We’re just two fanciful old women who have seen better days and who will die forgotten and useless.” A big quiet sob shakes Anne’s small frame but R doesn’t have time for pity really, “I’ve asked the guard, he said he’ll do us both when I started speaking of all the pirate gold we have hidden-”

“We have none of that,” Anne interrupts.

R has to ignore her because Anne is listening, she is, and this is something new and wonderful it opens a world of possibility previously closed, a world where R does not fail every time. She continues,“We’ll plead the belly and be out on a pardon in no time. Anne… Won’t it be good, to be able to live?”

“Not if I have to become a breeding cow to do it,” she is crying openly now, with tremendous heaving sobs and she’s barely intelligible, “Not if I have to find a man and be beholden to him for the rest of my life, not without my freedom and not without you.”

Is it bad to keep a terrible secret? One that you know will destroy the other when you tell it? Or is it worse to brandish your secrets like a weapon, to twist someone’s arm and make them see, make them-

“I am dying.”

“What?” Anne looks up suddenly, her bright blue eyes the only light in their cell and it breaks R’s heart, it does, because the moment she said the words she could feel them working at her bones. She takes Anne’s hand and places it in her forehead, knowing that it will be burning now, and she watches her lovely blue eyes for wide with recognition, “No.”

“Yes. Anne, won’t you live? For me, won’t you live? Go and get our children, like we talked, have a small life for once for God’s sake-”

“Don’t say His name,” Anne says, and she actually pouts like they are discussing peas for dinner, and how ordinary it is shocks a laugh out of R like they are still boys in Greece, “You used this on me once, those damn cows in France.”

“And you ignored me then as well,” Mary says and caresses her cheek again, rubbing at the wet skin until it is dry.

“I don’t know why you so want me to guard cows for the rest of my life,” Anne mumbles but she is smiling now, “Was this all you thought us humans did, back above or wherever you came from to torment me?”

“Is it not?”

The fact that they still joke in a cell, that Anne throws her body against hers like a punishment and laughs low stifling the noise against R’s shoulder, that is what makes R tilt her head, just a bit, and finally kiss her. Even if it’s just this once, even if it’s at least a hundred lifetimes too late, even though they are hopeless and in a hopeless place, still Anne kisses her back, hungry and angry with a hand on the back of her neck making them crash against each other like the sea.

When they part, Mary fixes her with a look,

“You’ll live then.”

“Yes. I guess this once, you’ve forced me to it.”

Mary Read died in prison, of fever.

No one knows what happened of Anne Bonny.

 

* * *

 

 

The streets of Paris are fuming with noxious vapors under the suffocating June heat. It fills what is already a stinking ancient city with a sticky reek that permeates the air and makes breathing hard. It’s been harder yet since talk of revolution went from just that, talk, to action. The Musain is no longer a café, but more of a weapons stockroom, and these days Grantaire can smell gunpowder on his clothes even though he has not set a foot inside the café in three days.

Ever since Lamarque’s death, Grantaire has been a man in hiding. He  disappeared without a trace the moment Enjolras started talking about what Combeferre calls, with grace and temperance, “practical revolution”. He is not to be found when Courfeyrac runs the streets charming furniture out of homes, not when Jehan makes impassioned speeches in verse in the busy streets, nor while Marius passes along pamphlets to people that probably can’t read them.

Grantaire is not where Les Amis usually expect to see him, conspiring with Bahorel about fixed fights, or chasing after Joly for a partner in cards or in dancing. None of them notice his disappearance though, they assume he has fallen out of favor with one of his rich older ladies that pay for the pleasure of his company and wit, or with one of their geriatric husbands, maybe he is sleeping under someone's door frame, out of his luck but about to rise again. The truth is that, even though every one of them finds Grantaire agreeable as a good laugh and a good friend, with notable exception of perhaps Combeferre and certainly of Enjolras, even though they all laugh and cherish Grantaire when he's at their table, they find it exceedingly easy to forget about him. The moment he's out of sight, he's out of mind.

Except for Enjolras.

He absentmindedly asks Combeferre while they are poring over maps of Paris to figure out where it would make most sense to establish fortifications after their planned first confrontation with the army:

“Have you seen Grantaire?”

“The drunk? No, and I wouldn't expect him to show up until the rest of Paris has joined our efforts. After all, he never had love for our cause.”

He asks Courfeyrac, who looks younger and more nervous every time he reports about the word on the streets on their nascent revolution and the people's will:

“Have you seen him?”

“Grantaire? No, now that you mention it I haven't. Do you suppose he has influence on the people, with his talk of cynicism?”

Enjolras had not even considered it, “No, I don't think Grantaire shares his doubts with anyone. I don't even think he talks to other people.”

From Jehan, a knowing look and a meaningful shrug. From Joly, concern about his mental state, if he is about Grantaire at this time. From Bossuet and Bahorel, uneasy smiles and talk of Grantaire coming by after there was word that Lamarque had fallen sick, to settle old debts that they had acquired in activities Enjolras was never privy to. They confess to giving him the money without further questions, sheepishly even though they know Enjolras never had any love for the drunkard. He feels bad about asking Feuilly, who is of all of them the one who is most exhausted from the effort of revolution, but the polish worker’s answer is astute and short as usual, “He asked me if there was work to be had in Marseille, I don't suppose we'll see him anytime soon”.

From Marius the most concerning reply, a confused look with his head tilted right, “Who's Grantaire?” Just a week ago he was drinking to his broken heart with the man.

The truth is, Grantaire does expect to go to Marseille. He buys passage with a convoy  of miserable migrant workers who had come to Paris for the winter and were returning for summer harvest. He doesn’t care about any of his possessions (a list: two shirts, a bottle of wine, a loose collection of papers with disjointed writing) except for a note that says ‘we enjoyed hearing you speak, go to the meeting today at the Musain, C et C’ that he shoves in his trouser’s pocket for sentimental reasons.

He refuses to see his friends die for nothing, again. He will walk away like a coward, and he is already resigning himself to finding another café to drink in, other spirited and good hearted friends to take advantage of. He is a man of the world, Grantaire is, and he will not, he will not. He hops on the produce cart with a babe in his arms and a few other children, prepared to regal them with tales of heroes and monsters of old, and he gets right up to the edge of Paris when he realizes he won’t be able to leave.

It’s not his father who changes his steps. It’s the wind that changes directions, and he smells a whiff of gunpowder on his clothes again, and he thinks he hears the sounds of shots and screaming, carrying from the heart of Paris even though he knows this to be impossible.

And there is no God to blame, no one else but himself and his weak heart that has suddenly decided that there is something like courage, something like hope still shining in him. It’s not Enjolras that makes him turn back to Paris, maybe that was the change. It was that it suddenly dawned on Grantaire that a world without Jehan Prouvaire’s poetry would be not only a poorer one, but one that he does not wish to see. Or maybe he thinks of Bahorel, wild and laughing even when fighting with fists or cane, or Bossuet who cannot dance without tripping and cannot bet without losing, or Joly who loves his Musichetta and his friend in equal measure, and tomorrow will not be alive to love either. Maybe it’s even the memory of Marius and his heart, spilling out into the table, so pure and beautiful that Grantaire remembers a time before wine, a time when he drank human emotion and human words, and he wishes he would take a sip.

And, of course, Enjolras.

Enjolras whose eyes never saw him in this life, who looks right past Grantaire at meetings, when his eyes do find Grantaire there is disgust and, worst of all, pity. Enjolras who gets righteously angry when Grantaire dares to prophetise the future, dares to defy him with the truth, what he has known for a while, that it will probably never get better.

When he does show up at the barricade, Enjolras knows they're going to die.

Grantaire stumbles out of a building previously thought empty and there are no words, there is only Enjolras there, looking at him, at him. Combeferre pulls at the blonde leader’s coat to pull him to a whisper, it’s still dark and quiet for now but they are starting to know, Paris will not rise. Dawn is coming, lighting the sky with tender light blue fingers and Grantaire feels like tearing his own head apart because he can feel the people around him, in the houses, still asleep and afraid.

He watches from afar as Enjolras tells the married men, the men with families that depend on them, to leave the rest to die. They have so much to live for, all of them, that Grantaire gets even angrier that even his golden god, his Apollo, fails to grasp the most fulcral point the angel has been trying to get him to learn through his millenia walking the earth: to live is enough. To survive can be enough rebellion to last him a lifetime.

Once all men decide to stay, Enjolras looks at him again (at him at him at him) and with a nod gets Grantaire to follow him up to the apartment above the Musain, where Grantaire has slept among barrels more times than he could count and that now has been transformed into a makeshift war room. Enjolras stands by the window and faces Grantaire, arms crossed and his body angled against the windowsill, seemingly not caring that his red jacket can be seen by the french guard. He looks at Grantaire and says nothing, for so long that the sheer force of the silent stare forces the angel to start talking, not really talking but more of a soliloquy, an unstoppable current of words pouring out of him

“Enjolras, I am tired,” and he really is, a bone deep sort of tiredness that makes him not care at all, the truth comes out of him and his only hope is for Enjolras to think him a drunk if he really does not remember, “For millennia I’ve watched you die, and die and die. I failed more times than I could count. I know you don’t believe me, you don’t know who I am other than sad, drunk Grantaire, but-”

“When you told me your name, I thought it suited you,” Enjolras interrupts him suddenly, moving from the window and striding towards him with purpose “Grantaire. Grand R.”

“What?” His voice sounds tiny and reedy to his own ears.

“Did you really think you had me fooled, with this depressed libertine disguise? You walked into the café looking for a cheap drink, remember, you were harassing Courfeyrac in the streets and he had adopted you as a friend… You walked in and I said-”

“You said, Ah, there you are.” Grantaire whispers softly. It’s impossible. It shouldn’t happen. When it had happened, he was drunk, too drunk. He saw Enjolras and his brain rebelled, went wild with pain. He was a fool that night, so drunk on wine and Enjolras finally being here, alive, a golden wonder in a dark parisian café. His Aenaes, his rebellious Antinous, marble made flesh.

He thought Enjolras had been talking to Courfeyrac.

He says that, babbling, as Enjolras gets closer to him, curious despite himself, like so many years ago.

“I waited so long for you, Rho” his voice is a kindness, “And when you finally arrived, I was disappointed.”

Enjolras has taught him this lesson often, for over 3000 years, but still Grantaire is shocked at the cruel words that are like a bucket of cold water down his spine, and more shocked yet at the man’s soft touch on his cheek. He would like to shove at Enjolras and tell him what he could do with his disappointment, but he is weak when Enjolras’ eyes are cold but soft, and his light fingertips move from rough cheek to a faded scar on his neck and Grantaire loses his words.

“You could be so much more. I thought that even when I thought you were human,” Enjolras continues, touching him like he can’t believe him, like he can’t stop himself, “Do you know that I only knew for sure that I was not insane just now, when you reacted like that?”

The thing about the greek statues Grantaire sometimes sees now, in the gardens of the rich, is that they are white, pure, wrong. Enjolras, on that first afternoon at the ABC, brought back the memory of the statues Alexander commissioned, as Grantaire had seen them, exquisitely painted in garish colors, gold and red and eyes lit ablaze. Now, in the small one-bedroom apartment over the café, looking at the blackened streets, knowing what awaits them there, Grantaire is struck again at the ingenuity of his father’s plan, to make someone so beautiful.

Enjolras’ fingertips make a cautious path over the place where his pulse thumps, to his jawline where Grantaire has a rough stubble from the past three days of drunken despair and no shaving.

“You used to burn me,” Enjolras says.

“I-I’ve stopped that. I was looking for you. For so long. I missed… I missed you for so long, Aenaes” Grantaire’s words are a fevered whisper, a prayer.

“Say my real name,” Enjolras commands without raising his voice or taking his eyes off Grantaire’s. He adds “Please” like an afterthought.

It hurts, after so long, it truly hurts. Grantaire has been so used to being human, so casual about it, that he forgot what it is like to spread his essence, to expose himself and discover the sharp pain of the divine. It starts with his eyes, that change from deep green to dark and blue, like the sea the only time Enjolras’ has seen it, during an expedition to his mother’s small fishing village. His eyes glitter gold, like the rocks Enjolras had skipped that day on the shore, watching them go, watching them go. Grantaire was small, shorter than Enjolras, stocky. The kind of man that you can trust in a fight. Now he expands, Enjolras needs to look up to keep seeing him, the bright grayness faded into the color of his mother’s work dress. The dress used to be blue but she washed it and mended it until it was soft and clean smelling whenever Enjolras ran to her arms. Under the sharp ozone smell of Grantaire, he thinks he would smell baked bread and sea salt. The angel’s unfurled wings occupy the entire small apartment, the space is consumed by the grey of the streets of Paris in the winter, when Combeferre and Enjolras ran in the morning mist, rebellious rascals out of the Sorbonne and into the world.

His many eyes are blue, black, green, deep deep waters. Grantaire - no, it is not him, it’s not Grantaire, - R leans in, and Enjolras is momentarily lost on the memory of an afternoon when he was six, playing by the ocean, and a wave suddenly carrying him away in a tumble of salt and sand, pulling him down and away from safety, away from the shore. He knew he was going to die, but suddenly there was a force, up up up, and he was sputtering and coughing in the black beach, his mother’s screams in his ears.

R leans in, his lips touching Enjolras’ skin, and he whispers his true name. The one God gave him.

Enjolras finds that he is crying. As the tears fall from his eyes they are burned off, dissipating into the air leaving only the salty residue behind. R moves back, and his many eyes look at Enjolras, waiting, expecting. He is so full of love Enjolras is almost choking on it.

In the morning, the barricade falls. It’s the first time they die holding hands.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, Enjolras remembers him right away, and it’s wonderful.

Open arms and open eyes, with that same coolness that has become comforting and safe for R, that makes him feel seen. There is even a kiss once, right on the lips, before they even get to speak knocking the air out of R’s lungs.

It was one of the worst times, if not for that kiss and all the ones after that. R hates London. It was not easy being a drunk man in London, with the cold insistence on money that R never understands, but he has done it before and survived (until he didn’t). As a woman, however, it is impossible. It was one of those lives where she was not sure if her dreams were real, or if maybe she was going insane. Sometimes she is more human than not, and she surely is that now. She was named Mary, but she goes by Marie whenever she remembers Enjolras and wakes up speaking french. With her family in Ireland she dreamt of having wings the color of the stormy sky, her scales shiny as she flew over the clouds, a terror and a beauty. In Whitechapel, she tries to drink the dreams away. She lets men do whatever they want to her body, she does not care for it. When they do it, she closes her eyes and lets herself go away to memories so old they have to be false, of singing hymns and being surrounded by love.

The summer heat makes Whitechapel unbearable with stench and pushes Mary out to try and find other ways to make money, even if there wasn’t a mad monster murdering whores. Mary is, at the same time, known as Dark and Fair. She is a lousy drunk and a mean one, but sometimes her fair skin glitters and glimmers in the light whenever someone convinces her to sing one of her Irish songs at the dark pub. If you get her drunk enough, the words are not even Irish, and she seems to shine in greens and grays, though even a babe can see that her hair is red like fire other times. Sometimes Mary takes to the bed for days and days, unable to move or do anything else but drink. Other days, she is full with energy and plans and fanciful dreams of moving to France and being a muse. It’s one of those that brings her out of East London, to a street close to Baker, a respectable neighbourhood where Mary sticks out like a sore thumb even in her best dress.

She is going to pose for an artist.

She is old enough and smart enough to know that the work will be the same as what she does in the filthy streets of Whitechapel, but at least here it will be warm and clean and she will be able to fancy herself a muse. She’s thinking of the nice ale she is going to buy with this respectable artist’s money when the door opens and she steps inside the dark studio, temporarily blind from the brightness outside.

Enjolras hits her like a train, crashing full soft lips to her, and R catches her like she’s nothing, like she is not surprised, like she’s not Mary Kelly and never was, but instead something else entirely.

“I thought you were going to be a man,” R, her own name coming to her just as it did when she was falling from heaven, is being twirled and kissed all over by the tiny blonde woman. Enjolras. Even though there were names before, and there will be new names now, R’s heart sings, Enjolras Enjolras Enjolras, like a hymn.

Charming and terrible, that’s his precious burden, Enjolras.

“I thought you would never show up,” Enjolras lets go of R’s shoulders and fixes her with clear blue eyes, much lighter than R’s own.

“I’ve been busy” Mary says haughtily, even though that is not true.

The first week is bliss the kind of which Mary Kelly never knew in her life, all they seem to do is to lay in the dark and whisper secrets to each other.

“Can you believe they called me Engletine? They say it’s after England but I think our friend is making fun of me” Enjolras says while they’re laying, and even though she doesn’t smile openly, R laughs at the familiar name they’ve called her father for about 100 years now, since Enjolras became fully himself and stopped believing in God over reason, even when faced with a literal angel.

Everything is changed, but everything is the same. This Enjolras rarely smiles or laughs, and so R starts taking note of every time she manages to coach a reaction out of the sullen blonde. This Enjolras cares much about aesthetic, and argues that smiling and laughing is bending her will to what is expected of her as a woman, which she refuses to accept.

Other than the painterly men’s shirts, the wild blonde curls, the unseemly tan skin for a lady, and the apartment where she rules supreme with no man to control her, the biggest difference is that this Enjolras seems to have no political passions.

Don’t get it wrong, she’s political for a woman, but at this point R was expecting to find her a rich suffragette or maybe an Indian rebel in the colonies. This Enjolras cares deeply about aesthetics and despises anyone who sees women as the weak gender, true, and when R tells her of life in Whitechapel Enjolras gets even quieter and goes off to sulk and paint while R dozes off in the couch. But there is no insistence in government, or freedom for all people, or silly ideas about revolutions, and despite herself R starts to hope that maybe this can just be their life.

For the first time they develop an actual routine, that Enjolras commits to her journal three days after R walked into the studio. Recovered from under the floorboards by a surprised renter nearly a century later, it reads:

_We rise at noon or later, since R enjoys night the most, and I’m partial to get lost in my work until the sun shocks it out of me. R cooks our breakfast - sausage, eggs, bacon, freshly baked bread dark bread she insists is a recipe from our time together in Macedon, butter and fresh cream - we fight because I do not enjoy eating such rich food. Half an hour later she will bring me black tea and toast. Grumbling._

_2PM I work. Lately all I do is paint R. This is good because all she does is lounge around, dramatically lying on every piece of furniture I own, smoking her pipe and discoursing at length about everything. Her favorite topics: the lack of spirits in my house, the various mistakes neo-classicists make about antiquity, gossip from Whitechapel, visions and wonders of the future she supposedly sees for us, what she’ll cook for supper or breakfast tomorrow, more fighting, more gossip, complaining about wine, denigrating Aristotle’s name, more complaining, what may be the identity of the Whitechapel devil, prophecies of the future, complaining about wine._

_3 hours is the most I can work with her awake before she proclaims herself deadly bored, so around 5PM we have tea in the garden. She is shy like she never was before but we have big trees for a house in London, big hidden trees that seclude us from spying neighborhood boys. I convince her to undress and we sprawl in the sun like lizards, or cats. She gets red and lovely. Freckled._

_9PM R will get bored and restless, spring up and go cook supper. Her spirits wane throughout the day, so at this time she will bang around the kitchen and return with some strange concoction she will not remember making. She is shaking, sweating and in a bad mood usually around this time. She has not had a drink since she arrived._

_I leave my work and make us proper supper at around 10pm._

_I read to her next: she loves hearing me read poetry or the old tales we grew up with. I finally join her in the sofa, where she lays still wearing her nightdress and one of the kimonos father brought from Japan, that she steals with no shame. I read her the Odyssey in the old language and she purrs, like a tired beautiful wanton thing. I read her my King James Bible and she hates it, laughs at every inopportune time and makes me laugh as well. I showed her the Victor Hugo, of course, and she laughed so hard she cried when we died again._

_My fingers in her hair, remember this, remember fingers in her hair and how it feels like seaweed running through open thighs when we swam in Brighton when we went there for mom’s health and there were no people in the beaches to see me so father would let me go into the water and just float. Remember floating there and thinking that if mother died it really wouldn’t be that bad, we’ve already had so many dead mothers. It was because of her. Remember how she smells like the sea._

_Remember it, really, the sea smell and how lovely she is, how you love her. Next time, find her sooner. Remember that she makes you happy. She is not a nuisance in your life. She makes you better._

_When she dozes, I go to work again behind my easel until the sun comes up again, and I take R to bed._

_I can’t paint it properly._

Maybe R gets complacent. The first week is difficult because of the shakes and sweats the drink gives her, making her weak as a kitten for hours at a time. The temptation of going and getting wine or gin would usually be too strong for her but she’s more terrified of losing Enjolras again. She cooks food that makes her sick and stays and complains all the time making life difficult and wonderful for the ascetic Enjolras. Enjolras prepares her a bath like she’s the servant and not the lady, filling the large lion footed tub with hot water she boils patiently and pouring lavender oil and other concoctions that Enjolras’ father’s new wife sends her in an effort to make her more feminine. Then she wakes R with a kiss to the nose, and she grumbles bleary eyed, adorable and soft in Enjolras’ painted silk kimono, she allows herself to be submerged in water and lovingly washed, her hair spreading out like a red fan when Enjolras tells her it’s time to rinse the soap out, before she takes a brush and scrubs R’s skin until she’s pink and soft like a newborn baby.

“You never used to be this pink”, Enjolras says, mocking the human vanity that R has as Mary. “You used to be gray and magical, but now you’re just as pink as the rest of us.”

“I’ll show you gray and magical,” R grumbles and with no warning grabs Enjolras by the shoulders and pulls her into the bronze bathtub making water overflow and splash everywhere. She is rewarded by the sight of Enjolras with her hair plastered to her forehead, sputtering water indignantly, when she comes up for air, on top of R and with her white linen men’s shirt wet and transparent and, “Come here I’ll give you pink as well milady” R ends up saying between tickling Enjolras and kissing her, between laughter and the sound of water splashing, and god, could you ever think two bastards like them would be so happy? Would she ever have guessed that they would deserve it?

It’s almost enough to make her pretend Whitechapel does not exist in the same world as this small wooden chest of an apartment, with its big french windows over the inner garden, and paint and papers strewn everywhere. It’s almost enough to make R feel safe, to make her feel like this could be home.

Then she finally sees what Enjolras has been painting.

“What is this love?” R asks carefully, frozen looking at the giant canvas that is propped up on a big wooden easel in front of Enjolras. The mug of tea she was about to set down scalds her hand. She doesn’t even feel it.

“The new piece I’ve been working on for the exhibition.” Enjolras says between careful brushstrokes, her brow knit together in that intense concentrated look she always gets when she’s working. R remembers seeing that same look in the ABC café meetings, and before that when they were preparing for battles, or in the evening before executions.

“Enjolras,” R says trying to keep her voice level and rational. Even though she calls her milady as a sort of dirty joke, R can’t really let go of a life of conditioning that taught her to be respectful of people like Enjolras and that makes her not get as angry as before, it makes her mind her words and keep her voice even when she repeats slowly, “What the fuck is that?”

The canvas is enormous, over six feet tall and at least 4 feet wide, which makes it even more ridiculous that R has never properly looked at it before, but usually Enjolras works on sketches, and the painting she’s stays covered in a corner of the living room while R is awake. R never thought anything of it, really, but now it’s obvious that even under her cool serious exterior, Enjolras knew she would be upset at it.

It’s herself.

Except it’s not, not really.

“It’s you”, Enjolras says without stopping what she’s doing, placing one more brushstroke blissfully unaware of the turmoil burning in R’s belly. Then she gets up from her adjustable stool and stretches her arms to the ceiling, cracks her neck to one side and then the other, removes the pince-nez glasses she wears while working and rubs at her tired eyes before looking at R with her bright blue eyes and asking, “What do you think?”

R has never seen anything like it. It’s not just the size of it, huge, but the way it’s painted, and the subject. Even someone has ignorant as Mary has seen the paintings in church, and she thought that maybe Enjolras was doing something like that, a portrait of Fair Mary Kelly, maybe naked and spread out beautifully over a chaise long. Is this not why she has been acting like she has consumption since she arrived at this house? Maybe she would ever get a mirror and the painting would be called something like “Vanity” and Enjolras would get rid of the weird mole on her stomach, even though if we are being honest that would be unlikely as Enjolras loves kissing that same spot and make Mary blush desperately every time. She can feel herself get red right now as well, but it’s anger coming, she can almost feel the blood moving up to her fair neck and making her blotchy and hideous like the thing in the painting. The thing occupies almost the entire canvas, with its terrible wings folded behind itself, its many eyes looking directly at the viewer. The way it’s painted as well has nothing to do with the kind Virgin Mary Mary grew up seeing in Irish churches, instead the painting seems broken the brushstrokes are not carefully smudged out but instead they are noticeable, angry, _there_. And the look of it is wrong, it’s not realistic at all but like all perspectives, all different ways to look at this nightmare thing, have collapsed into one view of it, an angry avenging monsters breaking the walls of art to look at them and find them not worthy enough. Its face though, its face with its many grayish eyes is kind and heartbroken, kind, it makes R think of the old fashioned phrase, “may we never deserve God’s mercy”. It’s all gray and angry greens and blues, a tempest and an angel, a fury.

“Is this the way you see me? This, this thing?” Mary sputters out and Enjolras looks at her wide eyed and surprised, ready to interrupt and explain herself except that R is so angry, so angry that she will not allow it, “You know me better than anyone in the world, Enjolras I know you better than anyone will ever... And this is what you think of me?”

“What do you mean?” the line on the center of Enjolras’ forehead is getting more pronounced, the corners of her mouth in a definite downturn, “This is you.”

The words fall between them like a boulder, like an irreversible thing, like when he saw Yeshua die and knew there would always be a time before and a time after, and the world magically agreed. Suddenly Mary Kelly can not breathe, she doesn’t know what she’s doing here, in the house of this rich lady, living like libertines with days gone by without thinking of where she’s going to get money for rent in the pension, for her drink, for her dresses, for the man that she used to let beat her less than a month ago. What made her think she would belong here, in this life? She turns her back to Enjolras, who is left open mouthed and with no words for once, and starts throwing things in a bag not even looking, through tears in her eyes that make the world kaleidoscope just like that hellish painting.

“R,” Enjolras starts, “Grantaire.” She repeats when Mary does not stop moving.

“Don’t,” she snaps, “Don’t call me that name. That is not my name.” She does not say that she hates that one, but she might just to see the hurt on Enjolras’ face. She doesn’t think she’s even been this righteously angry, that is usually her savage Antinous work, but it feels good, it feels like burning up and she does say it in a hateful venom dripping voice, “I hate it. Do you even know my name? Right now, do you even know what I’m called?”

“R, Rho, love” Enjolras says in a soothing voice, with her round eyes are full of sadness and pity, she grabs Mary’s wrist to stop her jerky movements and then she raises her hand to R’s red curls, trying to calm her even as she continues, softly, “How long have you been in this shape? Maybe it’s not good for you. I was just trying to show you, that I know you.”

“That’s not my name.” The angel repeats, deadpan, shaking away the hands touching her, “You don’t really know it, do you? It’s Mary, it’s Mary and I was born in Ireland and my parents were Brigid and -”

“No, they were not. It’s not.” Enjolras doesn’t look sad anymore, she is starting to get angry and that makes things so much easier, Mary just looks away from her and shoves another kimono that is not even hers in the suitcase that is not hers either and there is a small cruel human voice in her that says, good, steal from this rich bitch. Take everything with you. Mary rubs a hand at her eyes, like a child, and finally looks at Enjolras, thankful that she is taller for once. “You are not a person, R.” Enjolras finishes in a kind but stern voice, glad that Mary is looking at her again, “You are not, and you will never be.”

R steals her spine and replies:

“Fuck you very kindly, milady.”

Then she runs out the door, into the streets, vanishes into the chaos of London and then into Whitechapel again, where she belongs. No one has missed her there, and they receive her return with no surprise, just a few “Ay Mary, thought you were too good for us did you”. From all the things she brought in the suitcase, she has actually stolen no money from the big house one above Baker street. But God is shining upon her with good luck surely because a gentleman, one she has never seen around here before but one with a nice topcoat and hat and cleaner than most, offers to buy her a drink and then offers to buy more from Mary in the alley outside and she says yes because what else would she say with no place to sleep and no money of her own and no body that is truly hers.

The pain when he stabs her for the first time is not even that surprising, and she laughs as he kills her, which just makes him angrier and more vicious. How could she explain that she’s laughing because she should’ve known that Enjolras would always be right?

She is nothing.

Mary Kelly is the last known victim of Jack the Ripper and the summer of the Whitechapel killer ends that first truly cold September night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoa, we're back baby! Thank you so much for carrying on reading this ridiculous thing, it warms my heart because, to be honest, I thought I would be the only one who liked it.
> 
> Here are your real people for this chapter:  
> Alse Young, first woman to be executed for witchcraft in the American colonies  
> Anne Bonny and her girlfriend Mary Read, famed female pirates  
> Mary Kelly, last woman to be killed by Jack the Ripper


End file.
